direct conventional warfare against us military and paramilitary personnel is suicide. a leftist counter-insurgency coalition is outnumbered and outgunned on every front and therefore must resort to guerilla warfare tactics. if you want to know what kind of weapon is most effective in this type of scenario, all you need to do is look back to the vietnam war, look at what caused the most injuries and deaths of u.s. military personnel.
first of all, the majority of u.s. casualities in vietnam were not from bullets, but from explosives, namely mortar shells and mines. explosive fragmentation was responsible for about 60-70% of all us casualities in vietnam, and many of them were improvised explosive devices, often repurposed unexploded ordinance.
as for small arms casualties, the vast majority were not from snipers firing from long distances, contrary to popular belief, but from ambushes at very short range, 50 meters or less, with 7.62x39mm rounds, i.e. ak-47 and sks rifles. the viet cong would hide in the bushes and wait until the enemy was right on top of them and mow them down with close range rapid fire. the large heavy bullets caused much more grievous injuries than the more modern 5.56mm round.
snipers also played a vital role, but their role was more about psychological warfare than anything else; viet cong snipers often did not even aim to hit any target, they would do things like rig up a mosin-nagant rifle in a tree or in a tunnel and fire it remotely by pulling a string to terrorize and confuse the enemy. the psychological impact was devastating, us soldiers would surrounded on all sides by untraceable sniper fire and explosive booby traps, being herded like cattle into the aforementioned deadly close-range ambushes.
with all this in mind, i would say that the best rifle to carry in a hypothetical modern civil war type scenario would be a lightweight large caliber carbine. unlike vietnam, modern day enemy combatants will often be wearing soft body armor which protects against pistol and shotgun rounds, and even small-calibre rifle rounds to a lesser degree, but is useless against something as powerful as a 7.62 or the various deer hunting rounds such as the .308, .30-30, .30-06, .270, etc.
personally my choice of weapon would be a lever-action brush gun chambered in .30-30, such as the pictured marlin 336. at first glance it seems like an absurd choice, this old-timey lever-action rifle, but there is a
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